Comment

The Other 'Other McCain'

429
Original Kolya9/23/2009 12:09:51 pm PDT

re: #420 Charles

I could not possibly care less. If this so-called “movement” means that I have to throw my lot in with people like Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and Robert Stacy McCain, I’m not interested in being a part of it.

I’ve been trying to make sense of why what appeared after 9/11 to be a cohesive blog movement has fractured and polarised so dramatically in the past couple of years. I’m not talking about the factual history of the break-up. I’m talking about the fact that there must have been something wrong with the “movement” even before the rupture happened.

I think part of the answer is that people were attracted to the movement for a mixture of two different motives: 1) because they had a similar vision of what constitutes a decent society and wanted to marshal support in defence of that vision; 2) because they shared a visceral hatred of the people and ideology behind 9/11 and wanted to form the widest possible alliance to confront their common enemy.

For several years, tactical considerations kept these differences in motivation from becoming a source of friction within the movement. But as the focus of the conflict with extreme Islamicism has shifted from the military to the political arena, these differences in fundamental motivation have increasingly come to the fore.

As a result a visible gulf has opened up between those who, on the whole, believe in some form of universal humanist vision of what we are striving for; and those who are predominantly gripped by a sectarian exclusivist dogma that sees particular “other” peoples as intrinsically inferior, and a more or less permanent source of danger to Western civilisation.

I suggest that you, Charles, and your supporters, are more strongly motivated by the former kind of considerations, and your opponents by the latter.